Maybe “For Life” is a bit of a stretch, but I’ve never had a pair wear out yet in 5-10 years. 4 pairs/$15.49 I think is an unbeatable value. These are both my daily drivers through winter and summer and the socks I pick without hesitation for hiking — from 3 to 20 miles, never had any complaint.
I am enthused they’re back in stock at my Costco… but I don’t actually need any new ones!
Went to go see CAKE in concert last night (very fun) and was sending a link to “their popular song” to my uncle who didn’t know who they were. I said they were popular in “the early to mid 2000’s”
Gut punch when I see this song was released in 1996. Ffs. 30 years this August.
Nothing in my life can have happened “30 years ago” — the math just doesn’t make sense at all.
https://youtu.be/F\_HoMkkRHv8?is=AKO9WrWV-M8WBNJb
As an aside, in my childhood, The Beatles peak was 20 years prior.
Sometimes something catches your eye and you research and learn that it’s “a thing”. This is a “gurgle pot” or gurgling fish pitcher that makes a silly/delightful sound as it pours. $5.99 at thrift, retails $45 to $60.
But it sat on an upper shelf in my kitchen for a few years as a piece of whimsical art or a “prize” until I reminded myself that things are meant to be used! Now it lives in the bedroom as art, and transports water from the bathroom sink to plants in the window being ridiculous the whole time.
Alexey Pajitnov built the first version in June 1984 at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where his actual job was artificial intelligence and speech recognition. He wrote it in his spare time to test a new machine.
The Tetris Company now marks June 6 as World Tetris Day.
The machine was an Electronika 60, a Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11. It had no graphics and less memory than a modern calculator, so Pajitnov drew the seven pieces out of brackets and spaces. The whole program fit in 2.7 kilobytes. The game was nothing more than seven falling shapes and a fixed set of rules, with the speed climbing until you lost.
The design held up because the limits forced it to. Anyone could play within seconds, and nobody ever finished. The board never came down the same way twice, so it stayed interesting long after the rules stopped being a mystery.
Most software gets heavier as it ages. Tetris started with just its core and never had to add to it.
What happened next was a mess. The game spread through the Soviet Union on copied floppy disks, crossed into Hungary, and reached the West with no clear owner. By 1989 about half a dozen companies claimed the rights across arcades, PCs, consoles, and handhelds. Henk Rogers, Nintendo, and ELORG, the Soviet state agency that held the rights, spent years untangling it, a fight Apple later turned into a movie.
Nintendo secured the handheld rights, and those were the ones that counted. Bundling Tetris with the Game Boy in 1989 put it in front of people who had never bought a video game and sold the device to adults, not just kids.
The game was already good. The Game Boy made it global.
It was also the first piece of entertainment software the USSR exported to the United States, an unlikely export for a Cold War research lab.
Forty-two years later it still ships on nearly everything, because the foundation never needed rewriting. Screens and business models changed around it.
The game underneath did not.
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